Caitlin Clark Declined to Attack Trans Athletes. Matt Walsh Called Her “the Biggest Coward in the History of Sports.”

On Sunday night in Minneapolis, after her team lost to the Lynx, a reporter asked Caitlin Clark — the Indiana Fever guard and the most famous women’s basketball player in the world — how her locker room was navigating the fallout from teammate Sophie Cunningham’s comments about transgender athletes. Clark answered: “I think, for us, it’s not really a discussion we really have in our locker room. I think it’s for leagues and the governing bodies to work with their athletes to find solutions, but our focus is on basketball.” When the reporter tried again, she said, “I just answered for you.”

“Caitlin Clark might be the biggest coward in the history of sports,” Daily Wire host Matt Walsh wrote on Monday afternoon. “She punts on the trans question, which is the easiest question you could ever be asked. No spine.” Breitbart had already run its headline Sunday night: “Caitlin Clark Dodges Question on Protecting Women’s Sports.” OutKick, the Fox-owned sports site, scored her performance like a routine she’d botched: she “carefully avoids taking a side.”

Clark did not defend transgender athletes. She did not criticize her teammate. She gave the same answer that commissioners, athletic directors, and Olympic committees have given for decades — eligibility belongs to the governing bodies — and then declined to give it twice.

No publicly known transgender woman has ever played in the WNBA. Not this season, not any season. The college pipeline runs the same way: NCAA president Charlie Baker testified to the Senate in 2024 that he knew of fewer than 10 transgender athletes out of 510,000 across every college sport in America — and the NCAA barred trans women from women’s sports entirely last year.

The loyalty test is new. The apparatus running it is not — and it has never confined itself to trans women.

In 1931, a teenage minor-league pitcher named Jackie Mitchell struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in an exhibition game in Chattanooga. Baseball’s commissioner responded by voiding her contract and declaring the game “too strenuous” for women. Historians still argue about whether the strikeouts were staged.

Caster Semenya — a cis woman and a two-time Olympic champion in the 800 meters — has spent seven years barred from her own event unless she medicates her natural testosterone down to a number World Athletics will accept. Europe’s top human-rights court has ruled in her favor twice, most recently in July 2025, finding Switzerland never gave her challenge a rigorous hearing. The regulations stand anyway.

And Imane Khelif — a cis woman — won Olympic welterweight gold in Paris while J.K. Rowling and half the English-speaking internet insisted she was secretly a man, on the strength of an unpublished test from a boxing federation the Olympics had already expelled. Her reward for the medal: the sport’s new governing body announced mandatory sex testing with her name in the announcement — it apologized later for the name, not the test — and the reigning Olympic champion sat out last September’s world championships while her appeal waited.

The campaign now aimed at Caitlin Clark began as a soft-focus feature about somebody else. On July 21, ESPN published a profile of Cunningham, the Fever’s enforcer and the league’s newest celebrity, in which she addressed the “MAGA Barbie” nickname her fans had given her: “I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.” The next day she stood by it: “I said what I said. I think it’s kind of common sense.”

The machinery arrived within hours. The U.S. Department of Education — the federal agency that enforces Title IX, the law banning sex discrimination in schools — posted a meme of Cunningham’s finger-point celebration with a crown photoshopped onto her head: “Common sense prevails 👑.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters the president agreed with Cunningham and called the backlash “ludicrous.” Riley Gaines and Tomi Lahren praised her. Within a week, a veteran role player had become the White House’s favorite athlete.

Then the Fever left home for three games — Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis — and the content machine traveled with them. At each stop, demonstrators rallied outside the arena to thank Cunningham; in Portland, the Women’s Liberation Front — a group that has spent a decade fighting trans recognition in the courts — organized a crowd of about 50. Crowds inside booed her. The Fever said in a statement that “neither our organization nor Sophie had any knowledge of this demonstration.”

In Seattle it curdled. Storm minority owner Celeste Keaton confronted two 16-year-old fans wearing shirts from XX-XY Athletics — the apparel brand former Levi’s executive Jennifer Sey founded to oppose trans inclusion in women’s sports — and the WNBA fined her and barred her from the Storm’s next five home games.

The coaches, meanwhile, did something almost old-fashioned: they answered the question. Cunningham’s own coach, Stephanie White, said “I don’t ever believe that exclusion is an answer. I just don’t.” Golden State’s Natalie Nakase said “Sports is about belonging. It’s about inclusivity. It’s about allowing everyone to be their authentic self.”

Minnesota’s Cheryl Reeve — a four-time champion as a head coach — spent the weekend reminding reporters what the panic keeps omitting: “It is not the case that we have ‘biological men’ in girls’ locker rooms.” On Sunday she coached the game in a shirt reading “Trans Kids Belong,” then declined to perform outrage about her pregame conversation with Cunningham: “Both of us understand that we have platforms and we both talked about wanting to, more than anything, educate.”

By Monday, Clay Travis, OutKick’s founder, was announcing that he stood ready to buy a WNBA expansion team in Nashville and stock it entirely with “men who identify as women,” a bit he spent the afternoon elaborating with a team name built on a genital joke — “the most inclusive team in history!” Walsh called the most bankable woman in American sports spineless. And Concerned Women for America, the conservative advocacy group, demanded the WNBA adopt a policy “that establishes only biological women can play basketball in the league.”

A movement that says it exists to protect women’s sports spent Monday mocking women’s sports as a punchline, attacking the sport’s biggest star, and demanding a league expel transgender women it does not have and has never had.

The escalation will not stop at Clark. Last month the offense was saying something objectionable about trans people. This week the offense is saying nothing at all — “no comment” now scores as opposition. Cheryl Reeve’s shirt left OutKick complaining publicly that the Lynx had denied its writer a credential to interrogate her about it. Nakase’s inclusion answer became a Fox News clip within hours. Coaches across the league now get the question at the podium, and every answer — including no answer — gets sorted into content. The machine Cunningham fed does not have an off switch, and it does not have a finish line.

Three weeks ago the Heritage Foundation — the organization behind Project 2025 — published a report by senior fellow Scott Yenor titled “Title IX’s Failed Experiment,” which calls the law’s equal-opportunity requirements for women’s athletics “part of a sustained social engineering effort” designed to produce women who are “more aggressive, more competitive, more male, less relational” — and recommends rolling the requirements back, steering women toward recreation instead of competition while preserving “major revenue producing male sports.” The report arrived the month after the Supreme Court let states ban trans athletes from school sports. The trans athletes went first. The plan for what’s left of women’s sports followed within weeks: less of it.

On Monday, Penny Nance, Concerned Women for America’s president, called on the league to “look in the mirror and do some soul-searching about what it stands for.” The number of transgender women her policy would remove from the WNBA is zero.